Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 24 The Feast Day of Archangel Gabriel & the Dismantling of the Sacred Year (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.) Today is a feast day that no longer officially exists. For over a thousand years—by some reckonings stretching back to the earliest medieval Church, formally codified in the universal Roman calendar in 1921—March 24 was the Feast Day of the Archangel Gabriel. The placement was deliberate and theologically precise: one day before the Feast of the Annunciation, the day of Gabriel's most celebrated act. The Herald's feast preceded the announcement, just as a herald arrives before the news he carries. In 1969, as part of the sweeping liturgical reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church quietly abolished the March 24 feast. Gabriel was consolidated with Michael and Raphael onto the September 29 feas...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 23 The Sacred Power of Handel's 'Messiah'   (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.) On the night of March 23, 1743, the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden in London presented what its own advertisements carefully declined to call by its actual name. The work was listed simply as “A New Sacred Oratorio.” Its composer, George Frideric Handel, had made a deliberate decision to suppress the title—not out of modesty, but out of a calculated assessment of the controversy that title would generate. The title was Messiah . And London was not sure what to do with it. Even before the curtain rose, the newspapers had been alive with objection. One anonymous commentator demanded to know if 'the Playhouse is a fit Temple to perform it.' Others wrote that it was inappropriate for an act of religion to be performed in a playhouse, and deeply imp...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 22 The Journey of the Emerald Buddha   (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.) On March 22, 1784, a jade statue approximately twenty-six inches tall was carried across the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok with a ceremony befitting a head of state—which is, in every meaningful sense, exactly what it was. The figure is called the Emerald Buddha , a name that requires immediate clarification: it is not made of emerald. It is carved from a single piece of green jasper or nephrite jade—the "emerald" refers simply to its color, a deep translucent green that catches light in a way that early observers found impossible to describe in any other terms. It depicts the Buddha seated in the meditation posture called dhyana mudra, hands resting in the lap, body perfectly still, the entire posture expressing the quality of consciousness that Buddhism unders...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 21 The Occult Makes the Cover (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.) On March 21, 1969—the day after the Spring Equinox—the most widely read news magazine in the United States put an astrologer on its cover. Not a politician. Not an astronaut—though the Apollo program was in full swing and the moon landing was only four months away. Not a civil rights leader or a protest organizer or a general. An astrologer: Carroll Righter , the Hollywood astrologer whose client list included Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, and—as TIME would report in the same issue—the governor of California, Ronald Reagan. The cover story was titled "Astrology and the New Cult of the Occult," and it ran to six pages. It was not a dismissal. It was a reckoning. TIME magazine in 1969 was not a fringe publication, a counterculture zine, or an alternative press organ. ...